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Canadian Labour News

The new President of the Canadian Labour Congress says voters in Ontario sent a clear message when they rejected the politics of austerity and declined to vote for policies that target working people as the scapegoats for the economic failure of others.

“If you think you can win by blaming workers for the problems caused by others, you better think again. People see the unfairness. They don't like it. They will stand up to you and you will lose, just like Tim Hudak.” said Hassan Yussuff.

OTTAWA ― Far too many young Canadian workers are either unemployed or underemployed and governments must come up with a strategy to solve the problem – a problem that has been with us persistently since the 2008 recession, says Hassan Yussuff, president of the Canadian Labour Congress.

“Young people people want to work and contribute. They want to build lives for themselves but too often they can’t find work, or they are stuck in short term, part-time, and poorly paid jobs. Governments have let them down by failing to act. We owe them better than this.”

OTTAWA ― New Statistics Canada unemployment figures for April are grim again and show the federal government has no solutions for the country’s more than one million unemployed, says the Canadian Labour Congress.

The Labour Force Survey for April 2014 released by statistics Canada showed the official unemployment rate was 6.9% in April, a number that shows no improvement over March. What’s worse, the CLC says the rate of underemployment remained unacceptably high at 14.8%.

The Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) condemns the recent kidnapping by the Islamist militant group Boko Haram of more than 300 schoolgirls aged 9 to 15 years of age, from Chibok village, Borno State in northeastern Nigeria. The threat by this armed group to sell the abducted girls for marriage as retribution for their exposure to Western education is a repugnant testimony to the realities of sexual slavery and in clear violation of international law as a crime against humanity.

OTTAWA ― Delegates to the Canadian Labour Congress convention in Montreal have elected Hassan Yussuff as President in a contested election today.

Yussuff defeated incumbent Ken Georgetti, who has been CLC President since 1999.

Hassan Yussuff was first elected CLC Secretary-Treasurer in 2002, after serving as an Executive Vice-President since 1999. Previously he was national human rights director of the Canadian Auto Workers union – now UNIFOR.

Delegates will also elect a Secretary-Treasurer and two Executive Vice-Presidents later today.

Brad Woodside, mayor of Fredericton and incoming president of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM), is emphatic: “Municipalities do matter.” Woodside spoke at Sunday at a Labour Council Forum on the eve of the CLC’s 27th Constitutional Convention. The forum dealt with the importance of the relationships between the CLC, labour councils and local governments.

OTTAWA ― Ken Georgetti, president of the Canadian Labour Congress, has issued the following statement regarding the shootings that occurred on Wednesday, April 30 at the Western Forest Products sawmill in Nanaimo, BC:

OTTAWA ― The Canadian Labour Congress says the federal government has done the right thing in suspending use of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) for employers in the fast-food restaurant sector.

“These employers have been abusing the TFWP and it is high time that the government took action,” says CLC president Ken Georgetti. “My question is why it took so long, because the labour movement has been detailing these abuses and presenting them to the government for years.”

The Canadian Labour Congress has written a letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper on the anniversary of the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh. The letter urges him to take action on getting companies in Canada to sign onto an Accord for Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh. Another letter will also go out soon to about 130 companies in Canada asking each of them to sign The Accord. See the letter to the Prime Minister here:

Canadians would be surprised to learn that the federal government is using Kijiji help wanted ads in its statistical labour market data on job vacancies. Read Ken Georgetti's letter to Minister Jason Kenney on why a reliance on websites like Kijiji may not be the best indicator of job vacancies.

OTTAWA ― The Canadian Labour Congress has slammed the Nova Scotia government for introducing Essential Services legislation that denies nurses and other provincial health care workers their right to collective bargaining.

OTTAWA ― Minister of State for Finance Kevin Sorenson and his department provided misleading information to journalists and the public at a crucial time during the federal-provincial debate in December 2013 over expansion of the Canada and Quebec Pension Plan (CPP/QPP), says Ken Georgetti, president of the Canadian Labour Congress.

OTTAWA ― The president of the Canadian Labour Congress says the trade deal with South Korea signed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper on March 11 was negotiated behind closed doors and that it could further hollow out Canada’s industrial sector.

OTTAWA ― The President of the Canadian Labour Congress says the federal budget lacks any vision about how to stop growing inequality and the economic slide of middle class Canadians.

Ken Georgetti was commenting on the 2014-15 budget tabled in the House of Commons on Tuesday, February 11. “Canadians wanted a budget that speaks to their real needs, but the Finance Minister is more interested in continuing with austerity and balancing the budget. If now is not the time to act, when will it be?”

Once again the Conservative government is making ordinary working Canadians the target of unbalanced and unfair legislation. New legislation, Bill C-525 clearly favours large corporations by trampling on the rights of Canadian employees to fair pay and treatment at work. Never before in the history of our country has there been such a targeted and deliberate attack by a federal government on the institutions that have made the lives of the 99 per cent of Canadians who work for wages better off.

A Canadian Labour Congress research report shows that, due to lavish tax breaks, the largest of Canada's non-financial corporations had paid their entire share of taxes to all levels of government in 2012 by the end of January. We call that Corporate Tax Freedom Day.